September 10, 2015
A fascinating political face-off this week in
downtown Beirut will see the national dialogue called by Parliamentary Speaker
Nabih Berri challenged publicly by demonstrations organized by the You Stink
movement that reject the dialogue as a waste of time. These two poles of the
current national contestation reflect very different conceptions of political
power and how the Lebanese government should operate.
We should not expect immediate verdicts on
either the national dialogue or the You Stink activists. Much more time is
needed to reveal if the demands of angry and fed-up citizens enjoy sufficient
popular support to force the established old guard to change it frayed ways. If
so, Lebanon is in for a really exciting and important challenge to the
entrenched traditional leaders whose power comes from their share of
parliamentary and cabinet seats and government jobs that are apportioned among
Lebanon’s eighteen different religious and ethnic groups. As a long-time
observer of Lebanese politics, I find it hard to believe that the same
political leaders who brought the government to its knees and brought Lebanon
to its current embarrassing condition can suddenly change overnight and govern
more diligently. The national dialogue looks, feels and smells a lot like the
Palestinian-Israeli “peace process” that goes on for years, without any real
change.
The important question of how much support the
protest movements enjoy among the public cannot be answered by counting how
many people demonstrate in downtown Beirut. By this criterion, the obedient
forces of Hezbollah, Amal, Future Movement, and Free Patriotic Movement will
bury the citizen activists every time they take to the streets, as we have seen
recently. This is why three new elements of the protest movement’s strategy
strike me as significant.
The first is the use of tactics like symbolic
gestures and nonviolent disruption of normal business operations. These include
hunger strikes by a few activists, throwing garbage bags at the base of the
government offices hill, and filling the Environment Ministry’s corridor with
passive protesters. The second is the decision by the Union Coordination Committee
coalition of labor and professional syndicates to go on strike Wednesday,
coinciding with the national dialogue. Labor activism, including strikes and
organizing protests, tipped the balance against the Egyptian and Tunisian
regimes. The third, announced a few days ago by a new group called the People’s
Court, will see criminal complaints filed in court against Environment Minister
Mohammad Machnouk for committing an environmental disaster.
If such non-violent resistance tactics and
others to come generate mass support and successfully reform the power
structure and governance system, Lebanon could well provide an example for
other Arab countries to follow—that elusive third way between instant
revolution and prolonged civil war. I say this because Lebanese protesters are
asking at heart for a validation and reconfiguration of their system of
governance; they want the state to work efficiently and equitably and to
provide all citizens with their very basic rights, including services like
electricity, water, and garbage collection. Lebanese demand to be served
equitably because this is their right as citizens of a state, rather than as
members of a religion. Their vision of the role of the state and their rights
as citizens is very different from how the establishment men in the national
dialogue see the citizen and the state.
The protesters want the incumbency of ministers
and other officials to emanate from their doing their job well, which ideally
would see Lebanon institute a system of governance based on merit and
accountability, rather than blood lines and religiosity. Such an accountable
meritocracy would be noteworthy for other Arab states, where the efficient
functioning of the state still usually reflects occasional surprise inspection
visits to government offices by the caring monarch or benevolent great leader.
It remains the case that the single most important reason why citizens revolted
against their regimes in the last five years has been the corrupted state’s
heavy-handed, uncaring, and inefficient behavior towards its own citizens.
Also relevant to other Arabs is how Lebanese
citizens protest non-violently to change the way that political power is gained
and wielded. Several hundred million Arabs who still strive to live in
countries that respect them and their rights as citizens are watching Lebanon
carefully to see if it successfully implements a third way of national rebirth
that avoids both the sudden toppling of regimes as in Tunisia and Egypt, and
prolonged war and chaos as in Syria, Libya, and Yemen.
These are ambitious and worthy goals, and tens
of thousands of Lebanese have started to work for them in public. Many others
in the region are watching to see if at least one Arab society has learned the
important lessons of the 2011 Arab uprisings that have resulted in a range of
painful conditions, including spreading warfare and rejuvenated police states.
Rami G. Khouri is published twice weekly in
the Daily Star. He was
founding director and now senior policy fellow of the Issam Fares Institute for
Public Policy and International Affairs at the American University of Beirut. On
Twitter @ramikhouri.
Copyright ©2015 Rami G. Khouri -- distributed by
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